In some of the GDC Streams some Epic guy mentioned that they in the kite demo spawn all the grass and flowers in the landscape directly from the material, so the purpel flowers are whether the landscape texture is purple and so on.
I can’t find anything on how to spawn foliage from a material. I would like to spawn grass everywhere where my landscape grass layer is visible.
I know I could create something like a “foliage volume” where I do 10 billion traces everywhere and check whether there is grass material and if so, spawn grass foliage. But since it seems to be possible to spawn the foliage directly from the material it would be way better to do so.
Probably I have not found anything on this because it’s a new feature in 4.8?
They have mentioned environment tools a couple of times, so I’m guessing it’s part of tools that have not yet been released to the public. You can somewhat do this already, by designating which layer your foliage brush should paint to, but it’s not automated, and still has frequent crashes in the editor.
I don’t think it’s a ‘tool’ or ‘feature’. It’s just materials/blueprints, so I’m pretty sure you could attempt to do this right now. You can even see part of their material graph in the GDC tech talk.